Intimate journeys

Raju Hirani, the son of a typewriting institute proprietor from Nagpur whose two Munnabhai films have earned a collective box office revenue of Rs 200 crore, is sitting on a gaily coloured floor mattress in producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra's all-wood office. He's on the phone with Aamir Khan, who's just returned from a much-needed break at Chamonix in France where he rented a chalet to help wife Kiran recover from an unfortunate miscarriage.

A still from 3 Idiots

Aamir, who had hired a badminton coach to keep him in shape for a song to be shot in Mumbai with Kareena Kapoor, is waiting to watch the film that many are touting as the most-awaited this year and which Hirani has spent two-and-a-half months editing, almost without a pause, in the basement.

It's 3 Idiots, the story of three friends Rancho (short for Ranchoddas Chhanchhad, played by an 8-kg lighter Aamir who spent months with fake identities on facebook and twitter to see how young people think), Farhan and Raju, who come to the Imperial College of Engineering and learn the most important lesson of life: that if you chase excellence, success will follow.

It's a lesson they imbibe with some trauma but a lot of laughs in a joyful journey that takes them from Bangalore's IIM, where the bulk of the film was shot with the stars staying on campus and playing chess with students between shots, to Shimla, Manali, Ladakh, Delhi and Mumbai. Much of it is through what they don't learn from the character of Professor Viru Sahasrathabuddhe a.k.a Virus, played by Boman Irani, their much-hated principal who believes like the cuckoos, humans must learn to compete or die.

He also believes there should be no distraction from the task at hand, to which end he uses Velcro on button-down shorts to save time, writes with both hands on the blackboard to cram in more work, and gets inessential things like a shave and hair cut in the seven-and-a-half minute power nap he takes every day.

From baring their butts, dressed in regulation undies, getting them stamped 'Tested OK', and being forced to say jahanpanah, tussi great ho to seniors, to learning to heed their inner voice, the story traces how Farhan (R. Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) come together after five years to locate their friend, Rancho, who dropped out.

Watching Aamir Khan, with bag slung casually across, shuffing about, looking all of 21, it'll be difficult to believe he began his adult movie career in 1988. But 3 Idiots may also be remembered, laughs Hirani, as the only film for which the "three guys were asked to lose weight and Kareena was asked to pile it on".

A still from My Name is Khan

Journeys may well be the leitmotif for this season as Bollywood wakes up from the strike-induced slumber of a long, hit, starved summer. In My Name Is Khan, Shah Rukh Khan traverses half of America to meet the Presidentelect so he can tell him what he promised his wife (Mandira, played by Kajol) who screamed at him in a moment of sheer rage after their son is killed in a hate crime. His message: "My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist."

As Rizwan Khan, an Indian American who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism where high functioning intelligent human beings can suffer from problems with social interaction, Shah Rukh has given a performance that director Karan Johar calls his subtlest yet.

"In the past three years anyway there's been a diametric shift in his personality. He has learnt to rise above situations and step away from himself. In this film, he drops the sheen of stardom completely and yet pulls off a hero," says Johar.

Working with a handpicked team, cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran, editor Deepa Bhatia and sound engineer Dilip Subramaniam, Johar has made a film way out of his comfort zone. "I was directing the Rock 'n' roll soniye song for Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna with 80 dancers and superb-looking actors and I was so bored with my own world, my own moment. That's when I decided I had to do something different. And I believe My Name is Khan was therapeutic for me," says Johar, who collaborated with Shibani Bhatija on the story-she wrote the screenplay. "Just think of it as a biopic of a fictional character which is a Kajol-Shah Rukh love story at its core."

A still from Kurbaan

Johar took as big a risk with Kurbaan, which is written by Rensil D'Silva, an ad filmmaker and one of the writers for the radical Rang De Basanti. Its hero, Saif Ali Khan, plays Ehsaan Khan, a man who is propelled by his faith to become a terrorist, as he takes a leap from the sun dappled greens of Delhi to the gritty life of an immigrant in New York.

D'Silva was itching to direct a film, and Johar, who has never made a film that has a gun in any scene, didn't think twice about greenlighting the film. He did give D'Silva the script of New York, which friend Aditya Chopra lent him, to check for any similarities, on which D'Silva says: "There'll always be a girl, a boy, the best friend, and a race to the airport to get her not to board the plane with the bomb." With a team that was brand new to Dharma Productions-production designer Indrani Pillai, Company and Maqbool cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi and editor Asif Sheikh-the film, a mix of gloss and grit, explores the violence within us.

Which is vastly different from what almost happened with London Dreams, which originally began as a film written by Sridhar Raghavan meant to star Hrithik Roshan and Abhishek Bachchan before either of them had released their first films.

A still fromLondon Dreams

Conceived as a somewhat dark story of how an Asian band became one way for a group of four friends to escape the racism of the late '70s in Brixton, where Raghavan spent some time as a child when his botanist father was transferred to England, it was also offered to Aamir and Shah Rukh at one point.

Both heard a joint narration from Rajkumar Santoshi five years ago and said yes, until both demanded changes and the film stalled. After Salman Khan came on board, he spoke to Vipul Shah (who after directing Namaste London and producing Singh is Kinng is officially known among his friends as Vipul Singh), and the result is a film rewritten to suit what Shah does best.

It's intended as a colourful, festive, fun film that takes two friends-Ajay Devgan, as Arjun, the ambitious one, in the role earlier marked for Shah Rukh, and Salman, as the unforced talented Manu, which was to be played by Aamir-from the fields of Punjab to London and Paris.

Along the way, they acquire two Pakistani band members (played by VJs Rannvijay and Aditya Roy Kapur), a Tambrahm dancer with a dual identity (Asin) and never-before shoots for Bollywood at the Royal Albert Hall, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower bathed in blue, on a chopper flying over Trafalgar Square, and Hatfield House, the one time home of Queen Elizabeth I.

A still from Kites

For Hrithik, who returns to the big screen for the first time after Jodhaa-Akbar, the travel this time involves countries, not centuries. In Kites, he plays a largely shirtless Indian hustler-cum-salsa dancer, who helps Mexicans cross into America illegally. Mexican actor Barbara Mori is the woman he marries for convenience to help her get an entry into the US, until he bumps into her again as the wife-to-be of his brother-in-law to be (Kangna Ranaut is his fiance, the daughter of a loaded casino owner, Kabir Bedi).

But then both Mori and Hrithik fall in love and are chased across the Santa Fe desert by an assortment of crooks. The movie, which Reliance Big Pictures is banking on to launch Hrithik's international career, has already been edited for international release by Howard Smith.

When Reliance chairman Amit Khanna went to Los Angeles recently, he showed it to Rush Hour director Brett Ratner who's decided to add his own touch to it. In English, Spanish and Hindi, directed by Anurag Basu and set to be released in February, it may also be premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

It's not to say that this winter is only about the clash of the Khans, a rejuvenated Salman, an impeccable Aamir and a more tranquil Shah Rukh-the money riding on them is almost as big as last year. While 3 Idiots was fetching a price of Rs 118 crore before Chopra and Aamir decided to keep the rights to themselves, My Name is Khan was sold to Fox Star Studios for Rs 97 crore and London Dreams went for Rs 60 crore to Ramesh Sippy's Raksha Entertainment and Studio 18.

A still from Rocket Singh: Salesman of the year

It's also not just about Hrithik making that transition to global actor in a film that cost Reliance Rs 95 crore. Or about Akshay Kumar returning to his Hera Pheri roots, reuniting with Sunil Shetty, Paresh Rawal and Priyadarshan at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Singapore in the Rs 40-crore De Dana Dan. It's about young star Ranbir Kapoor in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year.

He's living out the dream of a small-town Indian making it big in the new post-liberal economy, written by Jaideep Sahni, who knows both about Sikhs (from his days at an engineering college in Karnataka spent mostly in the company of Sikh youngsters who had run away from post-1984 Punjab) and sales (from his days as an account planning executive for ad agency Contract) and directed by Shimit Amin.

A still from Jail

There's Neil Nitin Mukesh, playing an ambitious young man accused of a corporate crime and locked up in Jail where he is a witness to everything from underworld gangs to sexual harassment.

And yes, it's about Amitabh Bachchan, who's amazing as a 12-year-old trapped in a rapidly ageing body, being the wilful son to his own real life son, Abhishek, in R. Balki's intriguing Paa. Big stars, big money but also big ideas.

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